FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) - Interested in the biggest leak of U.S. secrets in the nation's history, but don't know a firewall log from a server file?
Then you would have been up jargon creek without a clue during the first five days of testimony at a military installation outside of Washington, where Pfc. Bradley Manning is fighting efforts to have him court-martialed.
The 24-year-old Army intelligence analyst is a computer whiz who worked as a civilian software developer. He was his unit's go-to guy for plotting data points and creating Excel spreadsheets in Baghdad, an intelligence officer testified.
But he may have met his match: a former hacker who turned him in, and in two info-tech gumshoes who bored deep into several computer hard drives in search of incriminating evidence.
Army Special Agent David Shaver and civilian contractor Mark Johnson are products of military or intelligence agencies with extensive government-funded training in their fields.
They said they found evidence Manning downloaded and e-mailed nearly half a million sensitive battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, and a video of a deadly 2007 Army helicopter attack that WikiLeaks shared with the world and dubbed "Collateral Murder."
Adrian Lamo, a onetime hacker convicted in 2004 of computer fraud, said his Internet chats with Manning in May 2010 produced "an admission of acts so egregious" that he felt compelled to alert authorities. The "depth of the unsurpassed leakage" made Lamo also concerned he could get in trouble for remaining quiet.
"I'm a journalist and a minister," Lamo wrote to Manning in one chat, egging him on to elaborate on his confession. "You can pick either, and treat this as a confession or an interview (never to be published) & enjoy a modicum of legal protection."
The government, which rested its case against Manning on Tuesday afternoon, wants Manning court-martialed for aiding the enemy and 21 other charges.
But Manning's lawyers argue that others had access to the Oklahoma native's workplace computers. They maintain he was a troubled young man who shouldn't have had access to classified material; that military computer security was lax; and the material WikiLeaks published did little or no harm to national security.
The digital forensic examiners littered their testimonies with the terms of their trade. Text files. Zip files. Hash values. Allocated and unallocated disk space.
They frequently mentioned Wget - pronounced "double-you-get" - a computer program for finding and downloading large amounts of data. They talked about Base64, a program that compresses digital documents for speedy transmission by removing all the spaces and punctuation marks.
"It may look like gibberish," Shaver conceded.